Transmission of voice by digital techniques has become widespread, particularly in long distance and digital radio telephone applications. This, in turn, has created interest in determining the least amount of information that can be sent over a channel while maintaining the perceived quality of the reconstructed speech. Devices for compressing speech find use in many fields of telecommunications. An example of telecommunications is wireless communications. The field of wireless communications has many applications including, e.g., cordless telephones, pagers, wireless local loops, wireless telephony such as cellular and portable communication system (PCS) telephone systems, mobile Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and satellite communication systems. A particularly important application is wireless telephony for mobile subscribers.